Between Ethnicity And Literacy

Chinese American literature as an emerging genre develops with Asian American Studies. The Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s'was in part a response against the Americanization movement. Among the many voices of multiethnic literatures, Chinese American literature emerges as a way of establishing identity and reconstructing the history for the Chinese Americans. Since its inception, Chinese American literary criticism has been carried out on a binary basis as apposed to mainstream American literature.The 1970s'witnessed the role of the author's origin and cultural sensibility in building up identity of the Chinese Americans, and critics paid more attention to the manhood aspect of Chinese Americans, neglecting the role Chinese American women play. From the 80s, identity study was more closely connected with gender and class. The 1990s saw the shift from the Nationalism paradigm to that of Transnationalism, national border crossed and the focus of criticism shifting from the content to the form of the literary texts. However, with the expansion of Asian American literature to the South Asian and Southeast Asian American writers, the younger generation of Chinese American writers and immigrant writers are neglected in criticism to a certain extent. As a result, there is a gap between Asian American literary studies and the fast development of Chinese American literature. Though Chinese American literary studies in China have gained a lot of achievements with many papers and monographs published, there still exist some drawbacks with most research centered on such women writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, resulting in discourse repetitions due to the influence of the previous paradigm of Asian American literary criticism. Based on an analysis of criticism on Ha Jin's works, Chapter IV intends to reveal that Chinese stories portrayed in the writings by immigrant writers are transformed into American stories when they are told in English.The significance of criticism does not mean to reach a fixed conclusion, but rather to expand the space of interpretation of a literary text. Conclusions can never be definitely drawn once and for all. The more classical the literary texts are, the more meanings people can explore in them. In light of the characteristics of Asian American literary criticism in different periods, the thesis aims at revealing the possible underlying reasons for the shift of focus from ethnicity to literariness in Chinese American literary criticism. Chinese American literature, as a kind of cross-cultural literary texts, can not be regarded as part of American literature if it is without literariness, nor can it be viewed as Chinese American literature if it does not embody ethnicity—its Chineseness at all. The ethnicity of Chinese American literature can be found both in its content and in its writing form. Therefore, Chinese American literary criticism is expected to combine the study of the content and that of the form together, taking into consideration of ethnic aspects and literary traits of the Chinese American literary texts. Only in this way can Chinese American literary studies go beyond the binary opposition, thus well combining literary studies and cultural studies together and avoiding going one way too far.